need a little jquery ajax help

need a little jquery ajax help

I'm really new to JQuery but am studying it like mad. So, thanks in advance for your help and explanations.

Here's the basic premise of what I wish to do:

1) I will have a unordered list of hyperlinks for staff members
2) when clicked upon I want the profile of that individual to display in a target div
3) I want the transition(s) to be a fade effect both in and out
4) there should be a default staff member in the target div on page load

My Assumptions:

* i'm assuming I can lump the list hyperlinks like so:

$('#staff li a').click(function() {
// code here
});

* It's at this point I'm not sure if I should use the .load('htmlpage.html') function or an ajax function
* Also, the 'click' would need to know which page to load into the target div
* And, which profile is the default display.

I see a lot of similar topics in these forums but didn't see anything specific to this. A general outline/guide would be greatly appreciated. I have no problem with the HTML structure of CSS aspect.

Thanks!